Richard,
The first paragraph I can't answer, but having had to recover my girlfriend's laptop hard drive contents to a USB drive this week I may be able to help you with the second bit. It's a bit long-winded but I'll post it anyway in case it's of any use to you. However, for it to work, your own hard drive must be formatted as FAT32, not NTFS. Linux strictly warned me about writing to an NTFS drive when I tried it.
Search for Knoppix on Google - it's a CD-bootable Linux GUI interface which will boot on any PC regardless of whether you use Windows or not. It's available for free on the internet as an iso image. If you download it on your laptop, burn it to CD and then boot your laptop from the CD (without the USB hard drive plugged in.) It'll load up the Linux GUI, which supports USB hot-plugging.
Once you're in, go to your internal hard drive on the Linux desktop just to check it's mounted and you can browse it. (Do it this way rather than going through the Konsole command prompt as for me Knoppix had a bit of a user-name conflict between Konsole and GUI and wouldn't mount the drives in read/write mode properly.) Then, plug in and switch on your external USB drive, and it'll appear on the desktop. Again, click it and it should automatically mount and you'll be able to browse it.
Right click on your own hard drive (the internal one), go to Actions, then click "Change read/write mode" and click on "OK" in the box that appears. Your own hard drive should be now in read/write mode and you should be able to browse the USB drive and drag and drop anything you need on to your own laptop's internal one.
Hope that's of some use to you.